The present invention relates to data processing by a computing device, and more particularly to management of hierarchical reference data.
User interface programs facilitate the interaction between humans and machines by inviting and responding to interaction from a user. User interfaces come in many varieties, and are designed to work in concert with an application program. A common situation involving user interfaces is a network connection between a server and one or more clients. The client/server relationship is one in which a server provides services to other computer programs in the same or other computers, the client devices. Both the clients and the server typically have a network interface for accessing networks such as a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or the Internet.
A common client device is a personal computer and a common user interface application for a network environment is a Web browser application program. The browser allows networked communication between the client device and a server using a data transfer protocol, e.g., the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to exchange files, images, or programs. HTTP is a request/response type protocol that specifies how the client and the server communicate with each other. The server may receive a request from the browser using HTTP, respond to it, and then close the connection. HTTP is a stateless protocol, meaning that each time a client requests a Web page, the server will respond to the request independently of any previous requests by the client, and without recording the request.
The contents of a file transmitted from the server and intended for display in a browser on the client device may be marked up with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code or Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML is a language that is used to describe the structure of a document, such as a Web page. Browsers interpret the HTML code to determine how to display the information contained in the page. A user may request a Web page from a server by clicking a hyperlink or entering a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) string. A URL is the address of a file that may be accessed on the Internet. The address identifies the Web server it is stored on and the directory in which the file is located. When the server receiving the URL request finds the sought Web page, the server sends the page to the browser so that the browser can process the page, for example, generate a display based on the contents of the Web page.